The building
Why the gallery is here.
Not because the address is a good one. Because this is where his club started.
1901
Waikīkī’s first large hotel
The Moana opened on 11 March 1901. Four stories, seventy-five rooms, a private bath and a telephone in each of them, and the first electric elevator in the territory. Oliver G. Traphagen drew it.
What stood around it was not the Waikīkī on the postcards. Hawaiian families worked loʻi kalo and loko iʻa here, taro terraces and fishponds, some of them centuries old. Waikīkī means spouting water, for the streams and springs that fed it.
A pier ran about three hundred feet out from the hotel, with a pavilion at the far end. It was gone by the 1930s.
Around 1908
The lawn, and the bathhouse
Duke Kahanamoku, Knute Cottrell and Kenneth Winter sat under a hau tree by the hotel’s bathhouse and named a club. Hui Nalu, the Club of the Waves. The members were known around the beach as the Moana Bathhouse Gang.
When the 1912 Olympic trials came, Hui Nalu paid his way to them by subscription and donation. He came back from Stockholm with two medals.
Dues were a dollar a year, and what a dollar bought you was a hook to hang your clothes on.
The beachboys
A trade, not a costume
The Moana became the headquarters of the Waikīkī beachboys: Hawaiian and part-Hawaiian men who taught visitors to surf and to ride an outrigger canoe, and made a living at it from the hotel beachfronts. Duke worked as one.
Hui Nalu’s captain, Edward “Dude” Miller, negotiated the beach concession with the hotel. That is the documented commercial link between Duke’s club and this building.
The courtyard
The tree, and the broadcast
The banyan in the courtyard was planted in 1904. It is about seventy-five feet high now, and it has been on Hawaiʻi’s Rare and Exceptional Tree List since 1979.
From 1935 until 1975, most Saturdays, Hawaii Calls was broadcast live from under it. For forty years, a great many people’s idea of what Hawaiʻi sounded like was made in this courtyard. The 1901 building has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1972.
Why here
A matter of record, not sentiment.
He named his club on this lawn. The clubroom was the hotel’s bathhouse. His club held the hotel’s beach concession. He grew up at the far end of this same stretch of sand, and the bronze of him stands a few hundred steps down Kalākaua.
There is no plaque here that says he stood on this spot, and we are not going to invent one.